


It's not scary when it's you

by thoughtfullyyoungduck



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Abusive Sonia Kaspbrak, M/M, Mentioned Sonia Kaspbrak, depicts past domestic abuse, physical and emotional
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-24
Updated: 2020-03-24
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:55:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23294341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thoughtfullyyoungduck/pseuds/thoughtfullyyoungduck
Summary: The abuse Sonia enforced on Eddie left it's invisible scars on Eddie, so much so that as soon as he's free from her tendrils, he marries a guy who does the same thing.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak & Richie Tozier, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, past Eddie/oc
Comments: 3
Kudos: 65





	It's not scary when it's you

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: this story depicts domestic physical and mental abuse (not between Eddie and Richie though), so please don’t read this if you’re not comfortable with that.

Sometimes, whenever Richie is gone off to do a show or get groceries, Eddie likes to think back to his past. Well, likes is a wrong word, but sometimes when Eddie can’t help but feel like he’s not doing as much as he can, like he’s not brave enough, and then it helps to think back of the place he started.

To the person he was before getting back to Derry, and getting all his friends back, so he can see the true progress he has made.

He’s having another one of his moments, where he is toying with the edge of the blanket of his bed while staring into an empty space full off nothing, the thoughts in his mind gathering themselves ready to take him through the entire mess that he once called his life. Like usual, Eddie’s not trying to stop it from happening, he’s learned from experience that that only causes the flashbacks to more violent.

Even years later, Eddie still can’t figure out how he let himself get roped into the relationship the way he did. After suffering through all the abuse his mother put him through, he ran straight into another sort of abuse.

When he met Chris the very first day he started working at the insurance company, he wasn’t even hiding that he was kind off an asshole. He was brushing off some poor intern when he tried to hand him the wrong coffee, and Eddie was sure that he was getting more mad and mad by the second, but then he stopped as soon as he saw Eddie. He was just so fucking charming, and when he never let that side of him out again, Eddie assumed that he had a bad day, and it was a onetime occurrence.

It wasn’t, and he got a lot worse than Eddie had seen that day.

It didn’t start out with physical abuse at first either, no instead, he used mental tactics to begin with. Eddie has no idea how he could have been so stupid to walk into the same trap that his mother had spun around him before, but alas, it happened and there was no use thinking about the what if’s. He had actually been really proud of himself for daring to go into a relationship with a man, even though his mother disowned him and refused to see after he came clean about it.

He was foolish enough to think that escaping one abuse was enough for him to be happy, but he was proven wrong faster than he hit the water after jumping of the quarry cliff back in Derry, back when he was still a kid.

Chris and Eddie celebrated his mother exiting his life with champagne and strawberry’s, and Eddie will always connect those two things to new beginnings, for the next day the mental torment began.

Chris liked to criticize everything Eddie did, even complaining about the way he would clean the house, despite knowing about how germophobic Eddie truly was, and seeing firsthand how meticulous Eddie scrubbed the entire place. He found it funny to place dirt in places that Eddie had just cleaned to a T, going as far as placing a dead rat in the bathtub when he knew Eddie was going to use it right after.

Eddie had shrieked loudly, sending him straight into another ‘asthma attack’ while locking himself in his bedroom out of pure fright. If only the memories of Derry had still been with him, he would have realized that there were worse things to be afraid of. Like IT, or Chris for example.

Eddie couldn’t even explain why that scared him so much, or how hurt he felt by the ‘prank’, because when he tried to, Chris devalued his feelings, telling Eddie to stop being such a baby, and that he was overreacting. 

He should have left after that, but he was young and stupid and he didn’t have any real friends, only his coworkers at the office who were also friends with Chris, so they weren’t an option anyhow. He didn’t even have his mother at that point either, not that that was a better alternative at the time regardless.

The longer he stayed with Chris, the more he was being brainwashed into believing that he was really blowing things out of proportions, and that he should listen to whatever Chris told him, since he could do everything better himself apparently.

He would complain about every small thing, and after a while Eddie got so tired of hearing what he constantly did wrong, that he decided to try and adjust himself as best he could to fit Chris standards.

He figured Chris was right, since all he had ever heard in his life was how delicate he was, and how he needed his mom to help him with everything, which was what Chris also told him all the time. He was always told that whatever he wanted to do was wrong, he was too vulnerable for it, and the judgment of both of his mother and Chris displayed just came out of place of love.

Eddie wouldn’t be Eddie however, if he didn’t get random burst of bravery mixed in with determination coming from seemingly nowhere.

At times, he would shoot back defenses at Chris, when he was fed up with constantly being criticized, despite knowing that would only piss him off. That was when Chris hit him for the very first time.

Eddie had only dropped a plate, but when Chris started yelling at him like he set the house on fire, Eddie screamed back. He called Chris a know-it-all, who did nothing but harass him all day, and that if he could do it better he should just do it himself.

Chris saw red, looking much like he had a sunburn, and his pupils had dilated so much the green had disappeared, leaving nothing but black in it’s wake. Eddie knew he was in trouble then.

The world seemed to crash to a stop the second his palm hit the left side of Eddie’s face, leaving an angry red mark in it’s wake that tingled for days afterwards.

Eddie laughed it off to his colleagues, claiming that he had fallen unto the side of his kitchen table at home, but he didn’t know how much of them actually believed him. It’s not like it mattered anyway, none of them cared enough to look further into it.

The hotel room had been booked faster than Chris could utter an apology, with Eddie rushing to grab a few clothes that he had stashed up in a suitcase he always had on hand for when he needed to go on a last minute work trip, nearly actually falling down when he speeded towards his car.

His act of defiance hadn’t lasted long. The thing was that Eddie had been stuck without anyway to escape his boyfriend. Which was as good of an excuse as any other, but it was still true.

Chris worked as his supervisor, so wherever Eddie went to work, Chris was there too. Even Eddie’s bathroom breaks shortened at Chris’s request, and when Eddie managed to excuse himself and go, Chris coincidently happened to be there as well when he exited the bathroom stall.

It got so bad that Eddie took a few days of work, but he was in no position to stay home, or more correctly his hotel room, then a few days, since he really needed the money.

A new job had been whipped of the table too, since they would certainly call the last place Eddie worked at, and then they would be confronted by Chris, who without doubt had no problem with lying and twisting things to make Eddie look like the bad person.

And then there was the emotional manipulation. He would buy Eddie so many expensive things, even though Eddie never asked for that, to gain his gratitude. That way, whenever he hit Eddie, or if Eddie tried to shake Chris’s words off him and didn’t listen to him, Chris could remind him of all the thing he bought for him, and make Eddie feel guilty that he was being so rude to Chris in the first place.

After five days, Eddie moved back in with Chris, continuing the cycle of mistreatment. He didn’t hurt Eddie physically often, but the threat of it hung over Eddie’s head at every moment like a thundercloud, scaring him enough to stay quiet and listen to everything Christ said to him.

Chris was visibly delighted in the way he could say anything to Eddie and get away with it, using that to his advantages at any time. The only thing Chris never did was call Eddie ‘Eds.’. For some reason, whenever Chris would call him that, he would get so irrationally mad, that Chris was worried he was losing his control over him, so he never used ‘Eds’ ever again.

It wasn’t ‘till two years later, while having dinner with the losers for the first time in 27 years, that Eddie would remember why he hated it so much when it came from Chris.

Sometimes, Eddie would grab a pillow and smashed it to the floor a few times, imagining that it was actually Chris himself. He would gain some sense of defiantment, and he would tell himself that the last day of Chris tyranny had passed. However, by the time Chris would get home and laid one hard look on Eddie, he crumbled like a sand cookie.

The day he married Chris, was arguably the worst day of his life, even worse than the day he had to go into the sewers to save Beverly, or the day he left Derry and left his friends behind too. The Party went on till one a.m. the next day, but Eddie had spend most of the night tending to his injured foot, which Chris had repeatedly stamped upon after Eddie accidently stepped on his while dancing.

Eddie couldn’t have thought of anything he wanted to do less than get married to Chris, but he was scared of the things he was capable off, so he didn’t see any other available answer than yes when Chris inevitably popped the question.

He likes to think that if he had remembered his friends, if he had recalled the summer where he threw away his placebo medicine, then he wouldn’t have gotten in a relationship with him. It’s wishful thinking, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t roam his mind on the daily.

When Mike called him, he had felt something he had not experienced in a long time. A feeling of white hot anger stabbed him straight in the abdomen and spread throughout his entire body like a virus.

At once, he recalled so many new memories that had been locked away in the deepest part of his brain and were now unlocking themselves, sliding back into places Eddie didn’t even know things were missing.

The recollections were still vague, things like names or particular faces not having shown themselves yet, but he did know one thing, and that was that he had survived something so out of this world that he was sure it was the devil on earth, and he had fucking beaten him.

He stood tall against a monster, what kind he was still unaware off, and he was done getting pushed over by every single person in his life, that ship had sailed.

He agreed with Mike to return to Derry as fast as possible, quickly assembling the same suitcase he used to go to a hotel the first time Chris had laid a hand on him, before turning towards the stairs to run out.

However, when he did, Chris was standing in the door opening eying Eddie with as much rage as toddler did whenever their mother wouldn’t give them the candy they had asked for and they were about to throw a tantrum.

He was sporting a wicked smile on his face too, as if just the thought of Eddie leaving him was too ridiculous to even consider.

Eddie gripped his handbag firm, glancing back and forth between the door and Chris to find the fastest way to get out. He had hoped to get out without Chris noticing, but that was clearly out of the question.

When he tried to however, he was gripped tightly by the arm, forced by him to drop the bag and walk backwards to stop the pain. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ Chris had asked him in that tone he got when he was about to explode on Eddie, the one that told Eddie he should think very hard about what his next words would be.

Eddie can’t remember in detail what happened after that. He got out of the house in hurry, leaving with nothing expect the luggage he already had at his disposal, and his passport and phone. He knows that at some point Chris’s fist hit him in the stomach, for there was a bruise to show for it, but it’s not as bad as it could have been, luckily.

Eddie had thrown his ring at Chris, yelling that he wanted a divorce, and when he later sat in his car calming down a bit, he was surprised he had managed to do that.

It was like his entire being had been focused on letting out all the anger and the hurt he had experienced over the years, and he was besides himself. He panicked at first, because he had absolutely nowhere to go, he didn’t remember the losers yet at that point, until he snapped out of it and tried to focus on the task at hand, which had been to drive to Derry. It had not been easy, and it wasn’t up until IT tried to kill him and the losers, that it really slipped his mind.

It was Richie that brought it up again, after they had defeated IT in it’s lair and they shared a attentive kiss outside with the sun shining upon then while the house collapsed a few meters away from them.

The slime stuck to them like glue even when Eddie tried to wipe it off, so Eddie refused to make the kiss last long, insisting that they needed to get clean first before doing it again. He watched Richie’s face go from somber, at Eddie’s first words, to absolutely ecstatic in two seconds flat.

They skipped the quarry, opting to go get clean in Richie’s bathroom, considering Bowers blood was all over Eddie’s, and spent some time just between the two of them. When Eddie unknowingly pulled of his shirt, Richie had gasped, staring at the dark blue bruise that had formed on the place Chris’s fist had landed.

Up until that point, Eddie had done a good job hiding what happened after he left Derry, and the years of assault he suffered from, but now the cat was out of the bag and Eddie was so tired of having to hide his emotions from people, that he promptly bursted into tears.

Richie, the sweetheart that he is, even if Eddie will never say that to his face, had rushed to his side immediately, doing everything he could to stop Eddie from crying, pulling him as close as possible but still so that he wouldn’t hurt Eddie.

With his lips pressed to Eddie’s forehead, rocking them gently back and forth, he began whispering reassurances, varying from how he would never hurt Eddie, to how he would make sure never else ever could. He later took it upon himself to tend to Eddie’s wound every night until it was healed, showing the soft and patient side of him mostly Eddie got to see.

Richie remained as loving as he did the first week he and Eddie got together. People often said that couples lose their romantic side the longer they are seeing each other , but the opposite was true for Richie and him.

He still woke up at least once a week to Richie bringing him breakfast in bed, or when he forget his lunch at the new job he worked at and Richie would prepare him a lunch and bring it to him shamelessly walking through the office.

One of his coworkers joked that Richie was like a lapdog, and he was ready to do anything for Eddie like a dog would do anything to catch a ball that was thrown. Richie proudly proclaimed this to be the truth.

‘Hey Eds?’ A voice suddenly pulls him out of his thoughts, Eddie turning around to see Richie carrying a coffee in his one hand, and a tea in the other.

Contrary to Eddie, Richie absolutely hates coffee, and he limited Eddie’s intake to one a day, since Eddie had a reputation of going a little overboard with it. If he drinks too much off the warm beverage he tends to get hyperactive to the point where he is running around like he’s a twenty-year old college student, and his hyperactive mind cannot keep up with everything that’s happening.

And that, that stupid little thing is what caused Eddie to truly realize how in love with Richie he really was. He obviously knew that he loved Richie, and he wanted to live with him or else he would be somewhere else right now, but the fact that Richie actually cared about his wellbeing, that small sign of caring someone in a way that is healthy, made Eddie understand what it felt like to be truly loved. 

Richie smiles gently at him, placing the two cups at the edge of the coffee table where Richie sometimes writes his material on, stepping forward slowly and with careful steps. He not scared of scaring Eddie finally, but even that took a long time, and he still doesn’t want to risk it.

At first, Richie flat out refused to bicker with him the way that they always did. Eddie can recall every single word of his speech in great detail.

‘Listen, Eds. I just got this with you, this whole relationship thing, and I don’t want to lose that. I love you, and I’m not too keen on things changing between us either, but the last thing I ever plan on doing is hurting you or scaring you and I don’t know when you find our bickering funny and when you’re genuinely scared. Until I do, I’m not going to bicker with you at all. You’re just going to have to survive without your mom jokes for a while. A shit okay, I’m going to stop bickering with you starting now.’

It was all meant lovingly, even Eddie knew that, but Richie glossed over the fact that Eddie wanted nothing more but to feel normal with someone. He was treated as a kid all his life, and now that he finally managed to break free from everything holding him back in life, for real this time, he was going to remain as hardheaded as he wants to be. And he wanted their interaction to include as much bickering as he damn well pleased.

He told Richie as much, who had then considered his feelings, and slowly reintroduced their bickering comments like they had never really left.

‘Oh fuck off asshole. Be a man and be convinced you’re right so I can prove to you how wrong you really are.’

With cautions. If Richie so much as saw what he thought might be a flinch, he dropped everything and let the subject die down along with their bickering.

Eddie’s path to healing had been anything but easy of course, and Richie wasn’t wrong, sometimes Eddie would get frightened over nothing, and he would be so disappointed at himself at those times.

Back at the Jade The Orient, when the losers talked about marriage, and Eddie had refused to say disclaim anything about his, Richie yelled ‘fuck you’ loudly, and it didn’t scare Eddie at all. He knows that Richie is not like that, that Richie is one big goofball who literally couldn’t hurt a fly. The insults he throws at Eddie are filled with poorly concealed affection, and the way he absolutely glows when he makes Eddie laugh makes the day appear a tad brighter.

Still, sometimes Richie will make a joke about fucking his mom, and Eddie would respond with the most fiery response he could come up with on the spot, he’ll freeze and wait for the hurt that he knows Richie won’t fire, but he still expects none the less. At those times Richie will give Eddie some space if he needs it, and if he doesn’t, he spends the whole night whispering to Eddie how much he loves him, and how brave he is.

Progress isn’t linear, but it still sucks sometimes.

Richie knows the signs of a ‘bad head day’, he calls them, where Eddie’s head fills up with bad memories and insecurities he tries to get rid of but most of the time can’t. When Eddie has days like this, Richie proceeds with caution, not wanting to make a sudden move and send Eddie even further into his head, even though Eddie always feels a bit better after laying eyes on Richie.

‘How are you doing? Can I help?’

Richie sits next to him on the bed, unclenching Eddie’s fist from the bedsheets and clutching them in his own, rubbing soothing circles with his thumb. Eddie shakes his head while looking over at Richie, since there really isn’t anything that he can do, and the moments are not as bad as they used to be anyway.

He places his head on one of Richie’s broad shoulders, using it to pillow his head and letting out a content sigh. An arm is placed behind his back, Richie’s arm twisting as best it can to rub into the lower area, the place Eddie complains about having pain the most.

‘You know, the last time I did this with someone was with your mom.’

Eddie laughed, his entire frame shaking with it as he lightly shoved him with his shoulder. It makes Richie happy, to know that Eddie is comfortable enough around him to be able to do that without flinching afterwards. He’s so

‘Brave, you’re brave Eds. The bravest man I have ever had the pleasure of meeting.’

He noses at the top of Eddie’s head, happy that he’s there and that Richie can help him in whatever way he can. 

‘Shut up’, Eddie complains, but he can’t help the pride fizzling over him at the words.

‘No it’s true. I mean who can say they survived a killer clown, a horrible mother, and a piece of shit and still didn’t let any of it bother him?’

‘Me I guess.’

‘Not you guess, you know.’

His body bent in an awkward position to do so, Richie places a kiss atop his nose, joyful when it pulls a giggle out of Eddie.

‘I don’t want to think about that. All that matters is that we’re here, and we’re together. You’re the best part of my life Rich. I hope you know that. With you, I realize that I don’t have to be scared anymore.’

To hide the tears burning in his eyes wanting to come out, Richie presses Eddie a little closer, slotting their lips together in a passionate kiss. Eddie’s lips were soft and warm, reciprocating with as much enthusiasm as he was receiving, the both of them poring their heart and soul into it. When Richie pulls away, he presses Eddie a little closer to his chest, nearly missing what Eddie says next.

‘And I also hope that you know that if you ever tell anyone I said that, I’ll deny it to my dying breath.’

‘oh, I’m counting on it.’

**Author's Note:**

> let me know what you think. Also I would just like to say that this is partially how I experienced some abuse, but I know that not everyone does in the same way so I just wanted to say.


End file.
